144 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
New hats and jackets, but the same old faces. A 
stout old farmer sat at the side of his barn door on the 
hatch leaning against the post. His body was as rotund 
as a full sack of wheat, his great chin and his great cheeks 
were full; a man very solidly set as it were, and he eyed 
me, a stranger, as I passed down the lane, with mistrust 
and suspicion in every line of his face. Out of the hunting 
season a stranger might perhaps have been seen there 
once in six months, and this was that once. The British 
bull-dog growled in his countenance—very likely 
pleasantness itself to those he knew, grimness itself to 
others. The sunlight fell full into the barn, the great 
doors wide open; there were sacks on the other 
side of the door piled up inside, a heap of grain, 
and two men turning the winches of a winnowing 
machine. New hats, but old faces. Could his great- 
great-grandfathcr have been dug up and set in that barn 
door, he would have looked just the same, so would the 
sacks, and the wheat, and the sunshine. At the market 
town, where the auctioneer’s hammer goes tap tap over 
bullocks and sheep, crowds of men gather together, : 
—farmers, and bailiffs, and shepherds, drovers and 
labourers—and their clothes are different, but there are 
the same old weather-beaten faces. Faces that you may 
sce in the ancient illuminated manuscripts, in the realistic 
wood engravings of early printed books, in the etchings 
of last century, the same lines and expression. The . 
earth has marked them all. In a modern country sketch 
or picture you would zo¢ find them, they would be 
smoothed away—drawing-room faces, made transparent, 
in attitudes like easy-limbed girls delicately proportioned 
These are not country people. Country people are the 
same now in appearance as when the old artists 
honestly drew them; sturdy and square, bulky and 
